Everyone wants Hamas gone.

Reality: Gazans are turning back to them for security because occupiers destroyed everything else.

This is what happens when you think only in military terms

The Movement for Islamic Resistance – Hamas - with its charter committing it to the establishment of an Islamic state throughout Palestine was founded by a wheelchair bound quadriplegic. He was a partially blind Palestinian preacher named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and the son of refugees from the 1948 “Nakba”. For forty years before the foundation of Hamas, and despite his injuries, the Sheikh worked as a teacher, earning the honorific of “Sheikh” and becoming a founder of the peaceful Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza.

It was the outbreak of the first intifada – the “shaking off” – that was the founding moment for Hamas. Heavy handed tactics by Israel, which deployed 80,000 soldiers to tiny Gaza with authority to use live rounds caused sparked violence and local security collapsed and initially the group was focused on defending Palestinians. Indeed in the ensuing years Israel worked with Hamas off and on, preferring the group to much more violent alternatives like the PLO. But the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre – the killing of 29 Muslims and the wounding of a further 125 by a settler in Hebron’s sacred Ibrahimi Mosque – saw the group’s tactics harden. In the early 2000’s Hamas conducted hundreds of devastating attacks on Israel, killing 400 and wounding 2000. Israel held the Sheikh responsible. He was killed in 2004 by a US made Hellfire missile fired by a US made Apache Helicopter. He was wheeling himself out of a Gaza Mosque.

In 2003 the Oslo accords agreed a basis of Palestinian self-governance and in January 2006 elections were held. Hamas won resoundingly. Observers reported “there was nothing to indicate that the final result was not the outcome chosen by voters”. But a 1997 US designation as a terrorist group made it a victory nobody could support and Israel quickly and violently put paid to Hamas’ political aspirations. Only in Gaza, despite CIA sponsored attempts to remove them, did the group retain power.

In the period since, Hamas just barely managed to govern Gaza’s two million-plus population. It attracted Israel’s ire by allying with Lebanese Hezbollah and becoming part of Iran’s “axis of resistance”. And its increasingly sophisticated military launched thousands of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel. In return the strip was subject to regular, devastating attacks and 15 full blown wars. It faced a stranglehold over water, electricity, communications, “dual-use materials” and the transfer of essentials. 80% of Gazans were dependent on humanitarian relief and most of its youth unemployed.

Over in the West Bank belief in a Palestinian state was quickly extinguished. Israeli bad faith, the Authority’s rampant corruption and economic restrictions left Palestinians mere pawns of the wider Israeli agenda. At the heart of this was Likud - the political party which since 1977 has been the dominant force in Israeli politics and whose constitution contains the line: “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” This is the basis on which, using the excuse of military occupation, Israel has doggedly expanded its settler presence on the high ground of the West Bank above Israel’s narrow, low lying central waist. Its intent is the expulsion of Palestinians from Judaea and Samaria, the ‘ancestral lands’ that Israel regards as its biblical homeland.

Hamas’ 2023 attacks provided the opportunity to complete Likud’s mission. PM Netanyahu committed to eliminating Hamas. The Strip suffered IDF attacks described as genocidal by international bodies. Vast tracts were rendered uninhabitable. Alleged breaches of the rules of war are innumerable. 75,000 Gazans have been killed.

In the West Bank regular forces relocated to fight in Gaza were replaced by reserve units staffed by settlers. Already lax policing of Palestinian communities became a systematic campaign of vicious persecution, often by uniformed personnel. According to UNOCHA in the two years after the atrocities in Kibbutz Be’eri, 999 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and over 10,000 displaced. In cities like Jenin and Nablus young men formed family and clan based armed groups providing security against nightly IDF attacks.

Now, as a US sponsored ceasefire in Gaza staggers on, Hamas is managing a comeback. Its daily attacks on the IDF have resumed and it is reasserting control over the judiciary and the courts. Its Police patrol streets, direct traffic and extract taxes. Gazans must revert to Hamas authorities for identity cards and health procedures. Crime has dropped and security has returned where armed gangs once roamed freely.

The moral thread of this problem collides painfully with the practical one. Hamas is back because Gazans need security. As much if not more than they need food. Most would be delighted to see the back of the evil menace that Hamas has become. But for as long as their security is threatened they will, like every other occupied population robbed of their security, seek out those who will supply it.

The board of peace boasts of its ability to restore peace and plans a luxury beach front development alongside a vast military facility for its peace-keeping force. Settler groups eye greedily the opportunity for fresh land grabs. Arab leaders look on in paralysed horror. There is no sign of resolution. Whatever Mr Trump might want to tell the world.

The Israelis have, for far too long, been so engaged in the operational task of beating the weaker party with their US supplied stick, unchallenged by the so-called morality of their western allies, they are no longer able to think strategically. And until they do, history will continue to show that occupiers do not win out in the long term.